Feel Good Onesies & Pyjamas

Three stories from around the world caught our eye this week. A feel good onesies story from Dundee involved a onesie wedding. The couple decided to have a more relaxed marriage ahead of a second ceremony overseas, so the bride wore a white onesie and encouraged guests to wear their favourites too. Passers-by smiled after seeing the couple and their guests leaving Dundee’s registrar’s office in onesies and images of the wedding have caused much social media comment. Opinions ranged from: “Brilliant! Must be a real fun group of people. Best of luck to them” to the nastier kind that we won’t encourage here.

And in the USA a feel good onesies story reported by the NY post and others: the Chicago Cubs baseball team celebrated victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers by having a onesie pyjama party on the plane home. Star pitcher for the Cubs, Jake Arrieta, threw a “no hitter”. A what? I hear you ask. Major League Baseball officially defines a no-hitter as a completed game in which a team that batted in at least nine innings recorded no hits. It’s a very rare event and a pitcher who prevents the opposing team from achieving a hit is said to have “thrown a no-hitter”.

And following our post last week about Onesie Collaborations how about this for an idea. At the KL Converge! 2015 annual conference and exhibition held in Malaysia last week the theme was advancing the digital lifestyles of Malaysians through converged communications. Prof Adrian David Cheok, a professor of pervasive computing at our City University in London, introduced the world of “mixed reality”, where one will be able to use special pyjamas to give each other hugs even when miles apart. In a real life application, they could be used to calm autistic children or elderly with dementia. Now if we could create feel good onesies that could let you hug a loved one remotely would you buy that?

A little more doubtful perhaps, also in the pipeline from the world of pervasive computing is a kissing robot that allows two users in different locations to remotely “kiss”. This robot is shaped like a rabbit and has sensors in the lips which detect and measure the pressure of a kiss. When users put their lips to the robots, they will transmit the “kiss” to each other in real time. “You’re probably wondering why we made the robot look like a cute rabbit. We originally made it look like a human head and everyone said it looked and felt creepy,” explained Professor Cheok.